Disclaimer

Black Dragon is MY Viewer, i decide which feature i want to add and which to remove, i share this Viewer to show the world that user base size is not important, i do rate quality by effort, thought and love put into the project, not some rough estimated numbers. I consider feature requests only if i you can name proper valid reasons i can agree on. It is my (unpaid) time i'm putting into this project, i'm not here to cater to every Joe's desires.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

As some of you might have seen or heard or read in my group , Second Life´s blog or some other blogs like Echt Virtuell , Living in a Modem World etc , Linden Labs officially announced the long awaited Material system, its going to happen (not that we didnt knew that already) finally! , this means we will be able to add custom Normal and Specular Maps adding even more details and more detailed details (yup) =3

I cant wait to get my paws on it as a lot of you also might do, i will keep an eye open, and i will try to stay informed about this soon public going project.

I should also mention that as soon as the code becomes public , i will implement it and you will then able to find it in the next Release :)

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

NOTE: That red Phoenix like looking Central Dragon is NOT included. Thanks.UPDATE: 32bit version available, enjoy as long as this pointless 32bit compiling continues.

i´ll keep this rather short this time
I need your feedback , lots of it , buy me some buckets of it!

User Interface:

As promised in my group and several other places this update i´ve focused on my Skyrim Preferences Panel, which should be now to 90% functional, and thats where i need some help. YOU will have to test it out , give me feedback about it , what could be done better , where and why. Also you should report any feature or button that is not working so i can create a list what i still have to implement. As it is now my new Preferences Panel replaces the Preferences Floater which can still be accessed by going into the main menu (NV - Edit - Preferences) which you will probably have to do a few times for some options due to not all of them working in my new Preferences Panel yet.

I´ve added again 2 new loadingscreen pictures in order to bring even more nice scenery to your teleport screens! Those are:

both taken in 6000x3306 and are downsized to 1200x6xx for the loadingscreen making them ultra antialiased with superior quality :)

Gamma Correction and Tone Mapping can now be invidually activated , not needing each other anymore , in the same change i´ve reorganized the whole Graphics panel a bit , moving the Reflection , Light and Shadow amount to the left side , render attached particles/lights to the top general options set and adding the experimental Save/Load & Backup setting presets system.

Preferences Panel:

What i´ve planned for it is that i will allow the background transparency beeing adjusted via a general slider that will always be visible when its open. You will also be able to disable the background blurring when Deferred Rendering and Depth of Field are on and obviously i will try to move all functionality from Preferences Floater to Preferences Panel. I will also try to find a way around that little problem when you open joystick prefs as example , it will open BEHIND the panel forcing you do close it in order to use it... i will probably make a combination of allowing you to set transparency to 100% and allowing clicking through the panel , it will allow you to just tone down the background and use the floaters without having to close the panel itself.

Rendering:

A bug has been reported that when you disabled Shadows while Deferred was active , Deferred and all its containing options would become unavailable and not checkable again, i´ve fixed this issue , it was caused by a shader i forgot to take out a line that has a non defined word in it , causing the whole shader not to compile and deferred getting disabled in its whole due to Linden´s awesome incremental shader disable system which will incrementally disable all features/shaders that fail to start/initialize/compile no matter the reason.

Release:

This Release only comes with a 64bit version of it at start , i might do the 32bit tomorrow.

Note:

Due to some conversations with Inara Pey about Server issues , i´ve teleported to a few SIMs , trying to reproduce it and also turned up Draw Distance to 768m , resulting in about 16+ SIMs getting fully loaded and rendered while Deferred with Shadows were active. 10 FPS while doing so, after leaving that SIM and turning Draw Distance back to my usual 64m i´ve checked my memory usage which was surprisingly low with 1,25GB in a half full SIM (which probably used 250mb of those at this moment), which is awesome and tells me that the Viewer finally scraps shit out of memory as it should when leaving SIMs, that means for YOU , you can stay online for an extended period of time without crashing due to out of memory :)

Version:

The Viewer is again updated to the very latest Viewer Development code and therefor now is absolutely up to date with Viewer Development , Pathfinding and HTTP.

before you start downloading i would like to focus your attention on a cool music album i´ve recently found and listened non stop.Lapfox - Figurehead Remastered
For everyone that might be wondering , yes those are "songs" created by a Furry , therefor i call it Furry Music.

User Interface:

Uh there has been done a lot here some changes i dont even know about :Q (Pathfinding)

As promised long ago there should have been a loadingscreen tips floater showing all available tips that can be displayed while teleporting/loggin in/out, and here it is! also while beeing at creating it i added 8 new tips along with 11 new loading screen pictures! wooooo!

Some pathfinding options have been implemented into normal and pie menus when right clicking an object , which will open the linksets and characters floaters. Object pathfinding attributes will be displayed in object task info for the time beeing... because there was no space in my tools floater anymore (which will get redone anyway), that means for you that you will have to right click and select object profile in order to see the object´s attributes.....ooooor you just open the linksets/characters floaters.

Did you know there was an E-mail display that is supposed to show your current E-mail address your offline messages will be sent to? i didnt, but i dont care anymore because its back anyway! hihi...

I moved the Progress panel on top of the whole main User Interface again, it looks better and it serves no real purpose to do anything in IM or Inventory while teleporting for 1-2 seconds if its not lagging badly.

I´ve removed the ability to toggle login start location combo and show server combo because its absolutely and totally pointless, its the login screen NO ONE CARES if theres 1-2 more widgets on a login screen that has been CREATED FOR THOSE BEEING THERE.

Rendering:

As suggested i´ve merged further upwards Exodus´s Renderpipeline to get the newest Tone Mapping , Gamma Correction etc. Personally i wasnt able to become friends with the new look of it yet... i simply havnt had enough time ...and then there were those.... people...called users....that were talking inbetween aswell wanting a more colorful tone mapping n stuff... so dont wonder if it looks more crap than before now , this needs serious redo now.

Fixes:

Me found fixes for crash when right clicking and selecting edit, i couldnt reproduce them anymore since 5-6 days so i can just guess that they´re fixed.

Vertical/Horizontal tabbing switch didnt work since Linden Code merge, the code for it was lost during merge. happens. Its fixed now and should work again , i also fixed the default conversation floater width to not cut the group list half off.

Also lost in Linden Code merge were my inventory system folder icons which should be different now again. :) Oh and for those that were curious about the My Favorites folder...i renamed it to Favorites because we all know that those are ours, we would probably have a few AR´s sticking in our ass if we could actually see or manage other people´s "Inventory" without loggin in with their account.

Default Window Resolution was increased from 1024x768 to 1280x720 to make the first start look good for the user , in this case to make the youtube video playing in login appear without black bars at the top and bottom.

I fixed glow only working in Deferred when Depth of Field was enabled, which personally wasnt annoying due to me having DoF on at all times, but it was annoying that when you clicked on your HUDs or selected an object in Edit mode, it vanished aswell due to the viewer disabling DoF in those cases.

I fixed all Focus Offset spinners not working due to them beeing Vector3d´s , the code i´ve written was for Vector3´s so the viewer was complaining about those not beeing correct values.

Friendlist rezzing lag is now absolutely minimized , even with a 200-300 big friendlist like mine :)

HTTP Project:

HTTP Project has been merged against all voices that said "no its dildos." I cant see a difference...seriously... HTTP was always slow for me and its still extremly slow , so i will probably just switch to UDP again, you can try and enable it, it can be found still in Display & Sound - Advanced Graphics - Textures - HTTP Get Textures.

Pathfinding:

Pathfinding has also been fully merged and is pretty much completetly supported now except.... the above mentioned little problem that i havnt had space for the attributes in build floater....and the thingy with the Havok License, you know... i wont get one 1. due to me not fullfilling all requirements and 2. me not wanting to sign another preorder new washing machine form.

Crash Statistics:

Some , all or none of you may have noticed that my Viewer didnt appear in the upper TPVD crash list this week... well Oz explained me that it isnt my fault, they had a little problem with collecting those crash statistics, so dont worry about it... (i was running up walls , turning my viewer upside down already....)

Version:

For those beeing curious, my Viewer now runs on 3.4.2 meaning it has 3.4.1 (Official Version) completely incorperated and is now on the way to 3.4.3

Snapshots:

Changelist:

1.48added Loadingscreen Tips Floater to show all tips displayed while loading/tp'ingadded refresh button for XUI Preview floateradded texture for missing assetadded pathfinding sub menu to pie menu for objectsadded leave group button to button panel at the bottom in people floateradded 8 new loadingscreen tipsadded 11 new loadingscreen picturesadded rotationdegree changes when selecting a layout at loginadded some missing strings to tools floateradded pathfinding attributes display to task infoadded current email display to which your offline messages get sent if you wish sofixed right click edit crash (couldnt reproduce anymore)fixed all inventory system folders having the same iconfixed own webprofile having a small scrollbar on default opening sizefixed horizontal/vertical tabbing option not workingfixed glow only working in deferred with active Depth of Fieldfixed (potential) moneybag button cutting balance display for some usersfixed a broken color definitionfixed group list getting cut with default tabbed IM widthfixed lots of logspamfixed some graphic panel spinners not clickablefixed Focus Offsets not working and complaining about wrong datatweaked avatarlist items more to minimalise UI creation lagtweaked Pathfinding floaters to be more compacttweaked keyboard layout change code so that it can be changed without relogtweaked featuretables , should finally prevent glowpow set to 9 and treeLOD to 0.5 by defaulttweaked tabbed IM tab textures for a way better looktweaked default window size to 1280x720tweaked max values for camera preset editing, allow up to 10tweaked Tone Mapping defaults due to different Tone Mapping behaviortweaked default depth of field settings a bitmoved Progress Panel on top of the User Interface againremoved ShowStartLocation Debugsremoved ForceShowGrid debugremoved FriendListShowPermissions debugremoved NearbyListShowIcons debugremoved and cleaned up NextLoginLocation debug and its functionalityremoved high res snapshot menu entryremoved menu entries to disable showing permissions and profile icons in listsremoved all show grid at login options and menu entriesremoved all show location combo at login options and menu entriesrenamed "My Favorites" folder to "Favorites" both english and germancleaned loginpanel internally upcleaned settings.xml upupdated special thanks pagemerged Tofu's SSAO haze fix, also made it a float again so it can be controlled via UI easilymerged Pathfindingmerged HTTP Projectmerged Exodus's Advanced Tone Mappingmerged Viewer Development , fixing the Friendlist loading lag